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MARLBOROUGH, MA | Web Industries announces a new, large-format spooling (LSF) resource for manufacturers of diapers, feminine pads, medical facemasks, adult incontinence, and related health and hygiene products. The LSF, which will be available the Q4 2017, is said to provide greater yield nonwoven and hygienic materials, additional uptime for production equipment, and faster speed to market.

The LFS is currently under construction at the company’s Fort Wayne, IN, plant and will occupy roughly 10,000 sq ft of floor space. Custom designed to process and quickly turn around large-volume, wide-web orders, the proprietary design reportedly incorporates state-of-the-art slitting technology, improved individual web control, and unique material handling capabilities for spools of large width and OD that maximize customers’ run time.

The large-scale spooler unwinds, slits to customer specifications, and then precisely rewinds materials onto cores for shipment to consumer goods manufacturers, where the material is fabricated into finished parts or goods.

“Large-format spooling is gaining popularity among major manufacturers of diapers and other consumer products for the yield and equipment uptime benefits it can deliver,” says Tom Lucas, Web Industries’ project manager overseeing the spooler’s construction. “The marketplace is expanding, and there’s more demand for LFS. With our new spooler, we are creating more capacity to match the demand. One of our advantages is that we can spool material on a very large scale. We can unwind, slit and wind a lot of spools very quickly.”

Lucas notes that hygiene product manufacturers typically work with his company’s engineers to select the best material based on price and specifications, such as tensile strength, absorption, basis weight, softness, and processability, to find the optimum solution. “Selecting the right material is a key consideration for our manufacturer customers. There is a lot to choose from, and we provide experienced assistance in the materials selection process. We are flexible in material source and manage the supply chain for our customer.”

Web Industries’ VP of sales Jason Surman adds, “We continue to see strong demand for new hygiene products in North America. In this environment, our large-format spools will help increase our customers’ line efficiencies and lower their total cost. Equally important, our investment in additional capacity will allow us to meet their growing market needs and provide exceptional quality with a wide flexibility in materials.”

The company says that, with smaller format spooling, product manufacturers load a smaller quantity of slit material into their production equipment, and then splice and affix incoming rolls as the material plays out. Compared with LFS, this process reportedly wastes material before and after the splice, and can require machinery downtime to complete the transfer.

“A diaper manufacturer might lose 20 diapers during a splice,” Lucas says. “Our new LFS, with its precision slitting and rewinding, provides splices that are useable. This facilitates longer runs between roll changes and, therefore, longer production runs. We can achieve lengths of materials in hundreds of thousands of feet.”

The new LFS is said to have advanced spooler technology with sophisticated programming that manages a spool’s traversing motion as material is laid onto it. Programming parameters can be very specific to enable materials to pay out at certain speeds and be processed in ways that will not crush or twist a web. The system can process materials having very light tensions, company says, in a wide range of slit widths on high-speed diaper and consumer product manufacturing lines.